21
MY consciousness explodes into a world of pain.
I’m dying. I know it with certainty. Blood pours from my mouth, and I choke, then cough, which sends more knifelike pain into my side. My rib has punctured a lung. I will drown in my own blood.
I lie on my back in total darkness. My right leg is cricked beneath me in a way it shouldn’t be. My left shoulder sits oddly, and I make a tiny attempt to move it, but fire shoots up my neck and into my spine.
I take a deep breath to calm myself, bringing another fit of choking. Tears leak from my eyes. I don’t have much time.
My skull seems intact, and I cling to the thought. If I have my mind, I have everything I need. And just maybe, I can heal myself.
Doctor Enzo thinks I’ve healed myself instinctively, though more slowly than I’ve healed others. But I’m not sure what to do. I can’t heal my leg in its current position. I would just have to rebreak it later.
Maybe healing is like all the other powers drawn from the zafira. Maybe it can be focused. Deliberate.
I’ll start with my rib, since that is what’s killing me. If it works, I’ll probably pass out again. And once I wake up, I’ll have to straighten my leg and shoulder before healing them. It will be awful. Maybe the most awful thing I’ve ever done.
Coughs spasm through my chest, and I turn my head to the side to let more blood pour out.
Don’t think, Elisa. Just do.
I close my eyes and open myself to the zafira. It rushes in like a flood, filling me with warmth and light. I imagine that I sense Lucero holding the floodgates wide for me. I imagine his toothless smile, his voice whispering “I will help.”
How close to death must I be, to hallucinate so?
I think hard about my broken rib. I make the pain in my side my whole existence, embracing it, understanding it. I imagine the bone moving back into place, the tissue inside knitting together.
But it’s too much—too much effort, too much sensation. The world spins, and unconsciousness creeps up—too soon.
Let go and let me.
“Lucero?” I whisper.
Promise me. If I do this, you will kill me.
I hesitate.
We don’t have much time. I can only draw the zafira when no one else is using me.
“I promise.”
Pain reaches its fingers inside me and pries me open. My back arches off the ground, and I scream.
Coughing, choking, gagging . . . I wake, and turn over just fast enough to vomit all over the ground. I spit to clear my mouth. Cough a few more times. Spit again.
And I take a deep, glorious breath. My lungs are clear.
I clamber to my feet, trying my best in the dark to avoid the mess I just made. I stretch out my right leg and test it by flexing my foot back and forth. Perfect. A bit of stiffness, but no pain. Lucero must have straightened my leg before healing me, though I’ve no idea how he accomplished such a thing. I roll my shoulder. It twinges a little; I’ll have to be careful with it for a while.
But I’m alive. And healthy. Thanks to the man who is determined to die.
I reach out with my awareness for him, the same way I would reach for the Godstone’s power: Lucero? But there is nothing. It’s like shouting into an empty cave, my only response a faint mental echo.
I call the zafira and form tiny candle flames at my fingertips. It’s effortless now, either from practice or from being in a place of power. I use the light to explore my surroundings.
The walls are round and made of impenetrable stone. The floor is different—not dirt, exactly, and not stone. Bedrock, maybe. A pile of bloody vomit shimmers off to the side, and I move my glowing hand away to avoid looking. There are no windows. No doors. Just rounded walls that stretch up into darkness. I fell a very long way.
It’s a pit.
The walls are too smooth to climb. I kick at the floor—too hard to dig. There must be a way out. If they want me for their living sacrifice, then they must have a means of retrieving me. Maybe with a rope, lowered from the trapdoor above.
If they want me alive, that means they have to feed me, give me water to drink. It means . . .
No, it doesn’t mean anything. What was it Pine said? Something about the living sacrifice existing perpetually at the point of death?
I sink onto the ground, my flames winking out. They will starve me until I can no longer defy them. No, I’ll be mad with dehydration long before that. Or suffocation, if this pit is airtight. Already the air feels thin and damp from my own exhaled breath. Or do I imagine it?
I hug my knees to my chest and rest my forehead on them, determined to think, think, think, until I’ve figured out how to escape. I don’t lift my head from my knees until I’ve thought of several possibilities.
The trapdoor I fell through is too high for the light of my meager candle flames to reach. But maybe it’s made of wood. If so, I can burn through it.
I unsheathe my daggers, glad for their reassuring weight in my hands. Odd that they never bothered to disarm us. Or maybe not so odd. The weapons of Joya d’Arena are little use in a place of magic.
Unless, like me, one uses them to do magic.
I draw in the zafira until I buzz with power, until my whole body glows. I spin in place, using the momentum to swing a fireball upward with my dagger. It flies high, explodes against the ceiling, rains golden sparks onto my hair and shoulders.
I wilt with disappointment. I caught only the merest glimpse, but it was enough to see that the ceiling is made of pure stone. There is a slight indention marking the trapdoor, but neither is it made of wood. It’s a marvel of engineering, really, to have a door of solid stone that slides so smoothly.
I let myself rest before trying my next idea, knowing things will be easier if I use the zafira’s power in strategic increments. I will not exhaust myself. I will not allow myself to be brought to the point of death. So I sit on the ground and close my eyes. I take slow, deep breaths, as if I were going through the warm-up exercises of the Royal Guard.
Nothing will stop Hector from trying to get to me. And if I can’t figure a way out of this pit for myself, I need to think of a way to make it easier for him to find me—like he did when I was searching for him.
When calm has again settled over my body, I rise, summoning flames to the fingertips of my left hand, and begin a thorough inspection of the walls and floor. It seems too much to hope that there is a hidden door somewhere, but I look for one just the same.
The walls are made of huge stone blocks. If they are as thick as they are wide and tall, then no dagger will pry them loose, and it is unlikely that any cry for help will filter through. But I do not give up until every block, every mortar-filled crease, has suffered the scrutiny of my probing fingers.
The wall is impenetrable, all the way around.
One section, though, feels a little cooler than the rest. And when I’m done inspecting the pit’s entire girth, I return to it and lay my ear against it.
Definitely cold. And I hear something, even through the thick stone. A hum, as unceasing and relentless as rushing water.
Maybe it is water. The balcony where the altar stood looked out over a great cliff and the river below. I fell a very long way. I am probably halfway to the river. Maybe closer. And the cold part of the wall is undoubtedly the part that is exposed to wind and water, on the very outskirts of the city.
I begin to pace, worrying my thumbnail with my teeth. The first time I trained with Storm, I blew a small crater into the granite cliff. My firebolt was so powerful that the rock melted, like fired glass. I was exhausted afterward. Storm teased me for being so clumsy.